Canton police put reports online for public

Canton police are joining Alliance in putting reports online for the public.

The Repository

Writer

Posted Jul. 16, 2012 at 12:01 AM
Updated Jul 16, 2012 at 4:04 PM

Posted Jul. 16, 2012 at 12:01 AM
Updated Jul 16, 2012 at 4:04 PM

CANTON

Want to know about a burglary down the street? Curious about that traffic crash you saw on Market Avenue the other day?

As of this morning, Canton police incident and accident reports are available online. Alliance has the same system in place.

Capt. Jack Angelo, administrative commander for the Canton department, said it has taken some time, starting when Dean McKimm still was chief, to get the system up and running. “We’ve probably been a year and a half,” Angelo said. “There was a lot of tweaking we had to do.

“We decided we would just wait and get everything down the way we wanted.”

TAC Computer is the department’s new records management system, Angelo said. It may be hard to measure cost savings, but, “It saves us paper. It saves us time,” he said.

Officers now can generate reports from laptop computers in their patrol cars, instead of writing reports on paper.

There’s another big benefit. “It allows us to combine a lot of other, smaller systems, into one,” Angelo said. A number of other local departments use it for those same time and money purposes. The new records system also will make spotting trends easier, an analysis the department already performs.

The system automatically will generate reports to the state, which then forwards figures to the FBI.

“Before, we only reported to the FBI,” Angelo said. “It’s an inevitable fact that we have to do it. The state doesn’t want us to be mailing their reports in after this year.”

FIND REPORTS ONLINE

A federal grant and $30,000 of local money paid for the system, and the department bought 30 laptops for cruisers at $3,000 each. The laptops communicate with the system via technology similar to a cellphone, which means the signal can sometimes get dropped, he said.

In line with Canton Chief Bruce Lawver’s desire to connect with the community, “It also allows us to let people have access via the Internet,” Angelo said. Police reports are available, as of 8 a.m. today, at cantonohio.gov/police. Alliance reports can be found at alliancepolice.com.

People can search for reports by incident number, the street or the date, Angelo said. Incident reports should show up in 48 hours, and traffic accidents in 72. Hit-skip mishaps may take longer because of the investigation involved, he said. Reports back to Jan. 1 are available.

Shift supervisors will run a blotter at the end of every shift, at 6 a.m., 2 and 10 p.m. Calls to 911 won’t be available yet.

“The big thing is the learning curve” for officers, he said. It’s a complete turnaround from the way things are done now. Out of 156 officers, about 30 still need to be trained, he said.

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People without access to computers still can come to the window at the station and get report copies for 10 cents a page, Angelo said. The records room is open from 8 a.m. to 4 p.m., Monday through Friday.

On the computer, “They’ll get the exact same thing as they would if they came into the window,” he said. “It’s just going to save our people some time.”

The department would rather have the reports accessed online. The 10 cents people would pay for a paper copy “isn’t enough to worry about.” It probably costs more than 10 cents to generate a copy, Angelo said.

There may be some adjustments to make after the online system goes up, he said. “We try to do everything we can to make it as smooth as possible. We’re trying to get into the 21st century and keep up with the times.”